Pieces of Vincent

Pieces of Vincent is showing at the Arcola until 25 September

David Watson got into writing early on in life. At 17, his first play, Just A Bloke, was staged at the prestigious Royal Court. At 22, his second play, Flight Path, was put on at the Bush Theatre in a co-production with highly respected director Max Stafford-Clark’s Holloway-based theatre company Out of Joint.

And now his third play, Pieces of Vincent, is poised to get a three week outing at a venue midway between his home (Walthamstow) and his birthplace (Islington) – Hackney’s Arcola Theatre.

The play tells the story of Vincent, a man estranged from his family, adrift in London and described as “human shrapnel”.

“Hopefully the experience for the audience will be as if a bomb has exploded and we’re picking up the fragments,” says Watson, now 25. “It’s definitely not a linear narrative. I suppose part of the experience for the audience is working out where the story is as it’s not a conventionally structured plot.”

Eight other lives are introduced during the course of the drama, set partly on London’s Southbank. “It’s almost a series of vignettes,” explains Watson. “Hopefully some of the excitement comes from there being several different worlds at work in the play.”

The playwright’s off-the-wall style is perfect for the Arcola, which has a reputation for fresh and radical modern theatre. The show will take place on the venue’s main stage – Studio One, a large but intimate space – throughout this month (September). The Arcola’s blurb describes it as “a mini epic about love, passion and violence in contemporary Britain”.

“The collisions of urban life: that probably describes what the play is about,” says Watson. “But there is an act of violence that lies beneath this. There is a perpetrator and a victim, but I’m loathe to go into that as it’s part of the discovery. I don’t want to spoil it.”

Watson wrote short stories while in primary school and got involved in the theatre while he was in his teens in Birmingham (he lived in the city briefly with his family after his dad got a job there working for British Gas).

“At the Birmingham Rep there was a group that got teenage dramatists together and about the second play I wrote for them, when I was 17, got picked up by Royal Court as part of their young writers’ festival,” he says.

Young he may be, unworldly he is not.

Pieces of Vincent is at the Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola Street, E8, from 2-25 September.
For tickets call 020 7503 1646.